Travel journal

 I once took a long, long trip by motorcycle through Central America and then circling South America.  I recorded notes of thoughts and feelings and happenings throughout the trip, which are linked to here for your enjoyment (or the opposite).

Journey by Motorcycle

Google Fi

 I was using Google Fi on a OnePlus 6t with no issues and was happy with it, with the exception of poor rural service compared to Verizon.  I bought a new Pixel 4a and thought that it would be a similar experience to the 6t with dual sims, a Verizon and a Fi, if not better as it is meant for Fi.  I bought it just before going to Mexico and did not fully test the dual sim dual standby functionality and when I got to Mexico everything went to shit.  Setting data to the Fi, I would often not receive calls.  Setting data to the Verizon sim, I would never receive calls.  Turning all data off, I would not receive calls.  My connectivity was limited to being on wifi.  Outgoing calls on the Fi sim while not on wifi, would show up as an Austrian +43 number to the receiver.  I have no idea how that happened and Fi support was not helpful, but would be curious to know the relationship with Austria.  For anyone with similar issues, I deleted the Fi esim and reinstalled and now I think all is working as a dual standby phone should.

A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith

I just sat around the house reading all day, mainly on the stool in the kitchen that I always sit at, closest to the big sink, made obvious by the big grooves worn into the tile underneath from it sliding, and only going outside twice.  I of course read the paper in the morning with breakfast, then finished up that last article in the National Geographic.  I skipped through a few not-worth-much magazines before getting sick of them and picking up “A Land Remembered,” which I'd been reading a little of every night and read through about 200 pages today.  The day was long, in a good way.  I didn't get much sleep last night so figured that I should take a nap and when I woke up, I was surprised at how high the sun still was and how much of the day was still available.  I'd also usually start getting tired and tell myself to go to bed around 10p, but it's past midnight now as I write this. 

The book also contributed to my weird feelings of the day.  Being taken through the rough lives of a few generations of Florida’s first settlers and seeing how different their life was from mine despite all of us living on the same land, only separated by a century in time.  The first generation of MacIveys in the book came down from Georgia into the unknown of Florida, building a place to call home out of the scrubs in north central Florida and after some bad luck there, moving again along the Kissimmee River for another generation.  I find it hard to imagine wondering into an endless woods with the thought that you would be staying there permanently, not just a little exploratory hike, but to be self sustaining.  But this book put you there.  As three generations of the family are followed, there were deaths, many of them under circumstances unknown to us and as with any good book, I cried after every family member died, as I could not imagine the family being able to continue with that person now missing, impossible.  But, they always did.

A man runs the cattle drives for 40 years, assembles the crew that sticks together through everything, from outlaws to gators and becomes best of friends with his family over that time.  He'll help anyone out and during that time period he saw whites, blacks, and Indians as all the same.  He always sits at the head of the table for dinner.  His wife has been with him through everything.  She's the cook during all of this, a fixture in the kitchen and dining table and during the drives on the prairie, and the men surely would not be able to do what they do without her.  And then they, the matriarchs, die.  And what did they do?  What did they accomplish?  Even after everything that they went through and accomplished, my feeling was still that they didn't have a complete life, they missed out on something, they just lived along a river in the middle of nowhere.  The book later also followed the third generation of the family, who lived more in my time, and caught the land boom in South Florida and became an agriculture grower and seller and very wealthy.  And yet when he died, I thought exactly the same thing, there was an emptiness.  The only way to judge life is happiness.

I get sad knowing that the way of life in the book is forever gone in the US and much of the world and I never knew it and never will.  I look at satellite images nowadays on the internet over the state of Florida and its hard to find much land at all untouched by people which makes thinking of driving a herd of cattle from the east coast to the west coast unimaginable.  I don't know if the MacIveys, the folks that lived during this time period and through that great change ever got sad about the change, but I feel sad to never know that way of life.  I know that our lives nowadays are much easier maybe, but I still can't help wondering what my life would have been like to live in those times and also feel like I'm missing out on something.

Health Insurance in the US

This is my hypothesis.

Up to the mid 1900s, doctors charged a reasonable amount of money for care; nobody needed to go into debt for a minor injury and no one certainly needed to pay two weeks salary or more for a few stitches. Then, the health insurance industry grew and doctors started thinking, "This isn't some poor family paying the bill but a billion dollar insurance company, I think that they can afford me to raise the rate a little this one time."  The insurance companies didn't put their foot down and then this process was forever repeated  and allowed the rates to beat inflation a hundred fold and now we are in the situation that we now have, where doctors charges are inflated, tied hand in hand with health insurance rates.  I am not a doctor and I don't know one personally and there are probably more factors, but this is my hypothesis of at least partly how this country's problem came to be and will be very difficult to solve.

Just found this article from the New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/health/for-medical-tourists-simple-math.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

The gentleman was offered the hip replacement in the US "at cost" at usd14000, then the hospital wanted usd65k to install.  "FU, I'll go to Belguim and get the whole thing done for usd13k."

America has a Spy Agency!?

From the BBC, July 2 2013, (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23158242)

"Mr. Snowden is wanted by the US on charges of leaking secrets he gathered while working as a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), America's electronic spying agency."

Man, I feel like shit seeing that written out, "America's electronic spying agency."  From the time of our birth, our politicians tell us that we live in the greatest country on earth, where we will be as free as possible and have the best chances to better ourselves, a tradition of America's leadership and politicians probably since the inception of this country.  Yet, we have a spying agency, just like Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union and many other countries written about very unfavorably in the history books.  Incidentally, these countries also had warrantless surveillance and secret courts, and spying agencies...I don't like where this is headed...

Fortunately, three countries, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia, have declared that they will offer asylum to Snowden.

More reading:
About how stupidly US government officials are reacting to Snowden and past whistleblowers...http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/05/blowback-white-house-whistleblowers
A recent NSA recuitement at the University of Wisconsin: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/shortcuts/2013/jul/05/national-security-agency-recruitment-drive
http://mobandmultitude.com/2013/07/02/the-nsa-comes-recruiting/

Hydraulic Lawnmower Pump/Motor Unit Rebuild

My slightly pre-2010 Swisher 60" mower, with about 310 hours, has been experiencing poor performance from the hydraulic drive units, so I decided to do something about it.    The mower advertises, "Driven by Eaton" but I was unable to find any identifying marks on the unit's cast case, maybe for a reason, though internet research points to them in fact being made by Eaton.  My mower has a model 778014 pump and motor unit on the left hand side and a 778046 on the right, though both units appear to be identical once removed from the mower, only the removable fluid reservoir differentiates them (and which boss is tapped for the bypass valve lever).

RHS unit

LHS unit

The units had a few symptoms that there were problems.  The top speed had reduced over time.  The units would "load-up": after going on flat ground at constant speed, the mower would come to a stop with the power levers still on WFO, only to start going again after a second or two.  Lastly, the units didn't like to climb hills.  They'd completely stall and if the levers were left at WFO, they'd get some nasty power pulses, but if they were feathered a little, usually the mower would get up the hill.

I first looked up new units, just to see the cost, before I spent my time taking them apart and Sears had them for about $800...way too much for the ole mower.  The cheapest that I found was Amazon in the $500s, linked below.



$500 was still a bit rich so I pulled the two hunks of metal out of the mower, put them on the bench and started ripping them apart.  My first thoughts were that the fluid looked pretty nasty, very thick and always with a silver shine, not good, though it had been the same fluid that the machine had started life with.  I started on the wheel end, which exposed two planetary gear sets stacked on top of each other, probably making about a 10:1 reduction to the wheel, and a clutch system.

Planetary reduction stack and clutch

After that is the hydraulic motor, a radial piston type, bores arranged radially on a rotating "drum" with a ball acting as the piston in each bore that rides on an eccentric race thereby causing them to move in and out of the bore, which in the case of a motor, the pressurized fluid behind each ball with cause the drum to rotate.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_motor and an image search should be helpful.

Drum and "pistons"

The drum still in the case, the eccentricity can be seen at the bottom

The drum can be seen to the left still attached to the output

Next I pulled apart the pump side to find what appears to be exactly the same design as the motor, dimensionally.  Here of course, the drum is driven and the balls moving in and out of the bores is what pressurizes the fluid.  A big difference from the motor side was that the piston's race is movable, altering the eccentricity, which could reverse the suction and pressure lines, and makes for your reverse mechanism.

The pump drum in the center, surrounded by a movable race

That's about it, I disassembled everything, used a bunch of brake cleaner, and put it all back together.  I didn't replace any hard parts, other than having to cut a new gasket for the motor side, and did not find anything in the unit that gave me alarm.  I refilled each unit with ATF and actually Mopar ATF+3 at that because I already had some on the shelf, and stuffed them back into the mower.

So how is the mower working now?  I still have not done much besides some test cruises, but I'd say damn near brand new!  Hell yeah!  The top speed is back to normal, which I had a hard time remembering, the stalling problem is gone, and I haven't tried to climb any hill yet, but doing a zero radius turn on concrete, the reversing tire can be made to squeel!  All of the problems that I'd experienced with the units just came down to the fluid.

Throwing Oranges at Cars

While growing up, my house was situated in an orange grove, with a large irrigation and drainage ditch separating it from a well traveled road.  When we were real young, elementary school age, my siblings and I would play down there in the ditch, on our island, surrounded by weeds and algae, if there hadn't been any strong rains.  But when I was a little older, probably middle school age, my brother and I and some of the similarly aged neighborhood boys would go along the ditch away from the house so that it wouldn't be associated with what we were doing, and then pick oranges off of trees and lob them at passing cars across the ditch.  Of course for us, timing was very important; our hope was for the orange to slam into the windshield of the car and to cause a strong reaction from the driver, preferably loudly screeching tires.  For which we would react by tearing back into the groves at max speed, starring at each other with huge eyeballs and full of laughter, and we were never spotted in all of our times doing this.

I don't recall totally how I felt about it then, but I started to feel remorseful and plain bad about doing this later on in life, although we never caused any real damage as far as I know.  It kinda came back around though.  One night, while in university, I'd left my house, the same house, to drive back to school after a weekend at home and while cruising down a grove lined rural road on my way to the interstate, an orange came out of nowhere and slammed into my windshield.  I did a quick search of the surrounding groves as best I could at night, but I never found the little punks.

"Manifestações" in Brazil

Since a R$0.20 (Brazilian Reais, about usd0.11) increase in bus fares in early June 2013 for the city bus system of São Paulo, the city erupted in protests which are now spreading throughout the country, including Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Belém, Brasilia, Curitiba, Porto Alegre, and Fortaleza, (http://g1.globo.com/brasil/protestos-2013/infografico/platb/) with more cities being added daily.  The marches through São Paulo started as only a protest to the bus fare increase, the most expensive in Brazil (http://www.terra.com.br/noticias/infograficos/tarifas-de-onibus/), though the R$0.20 (7%) hike is less than inflation, which has ranged between 7.31% and 4.92% (http://www.tradingeconomics.com/brazil/inflation-cpi) since the last ticket increase in January 2011.

But since the scene first started in São Paulo, other causes have joined in, causing the manifestations, as they're being called in Brazil, to spread.  The most common complaints are the costs of the World Cup and Olympics, respectively in 2014 and 2016, the sorry state of public health and education, deteriorating infrastructure, increasing violence, and corruption and large inequalities between the public and public servants.

One of the largest is the massive current government spending on the hosting of the World Cup and Olympics, respectively in 2014 and 2016, and even the Confederations Cup currently occurring and which has seen slight disruptions due to the protests.  Twelve host cities will host games of the 2014 World Cup, seven of them will construct completely new stadiums and the other five have stadiums that will undergo renovations.  Firm numbers are hard to come by, but I'm finding either usd1.1 billion or usd5 billion for all of the stadium work (conflicting real and dollar amounts), usd2.5 billion for airport improvements, and another usd1.5 billion for general works related to the World Cup, mostly related to transportation improvements, though many protesters are showing closer to usd30 billion on their signs, but I am not sure where those numbers come from, though here, I neither disagree or agree with the signs.  But regardless, the complaint is that everyday, Brazilians drive on crumbling roads next to massive spending on stadium construction projects in the twelve host cities which will result in debatable benefits for most Brazilians.  The story is similar for the coming 2016 Olympics.  For the protesters, there are many better areas where the spending could be focused than can provide lasting benefits for Brazil.

Protesters argue that while these stadiums are built with large government funds, the country has a terrible public health and education system.  Hospitals are understaffed and lacking tools and public education is nearly worthless.  Anyone that can afford private education or private health will not bother with the offerings from the government.  Brazil's infrastructure is deteriorating and to some economists is limiting the growth of the Brazilian economy, which is experiencing high inflation and a decrease of the BOVESPA this year (http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/IBOV:IND), as well as only a 0.9% economic gain for the year 2012 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21630930).

Violence is an increasing problem for Brasil, which is in the top 20 for murder rates in the world.  Petty crime is an increasing problem as well, such as assaults on the street even in city centers, nearly always targeted at women.  In some towns, you'll have a hard time finding a woman than has never been a victim.  No noticeable change has been made to the quantity of police or where they are stationed.

Lastly is the corruption perceived by the population and the entitlements of the governement and public servants.  The minimum wage in Brazil in R$678 per month.  For a senator to make one hundred times that, plus housing allowances, food allowance, the ability to hire family to help with his job, also with a high salary, is not uncommon.  Amazing quantities of money have been documented (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/world/americas/brazil-seethes-over-public-officials-super-salaries.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0).  And all the time, large, heavily publicized corruption scandals are happening in Brazil, with the accused largely found guilty but facing no punishments and buying their elected seat back after a few years.  See Fernando Collor de Mello and Renan Calheiros to name a few.  However, this policy is maybe changing after the recent Mensalão ruling.

The government still has not released much at all on this issue.  The people of Brazil are happy that their country is doing this and are excited for change.

More information:
video from Rio de Janeiro that really shows the extent of people present:
https://vines.s3.amazonaws.com/v/videos/0B0FD0D4-DED1-4F5C-BF9F-6E76488BCCDD-696-0000001B9FB6D9FD_1f58eaaf58e.1.2.mp4?versionId=q36TN0.uTojyFa1tRQuAVFA3YJtkwHoo.  Many more on youtube...
photos:  http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/06/protests-spread-across-brazil/100536/
news:  http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21568722-historic-trial-those-guilty-legislative-votes-cash-scheme-draws-close
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/why-are-brazilians-protesting/276970/

Going in the Dark

When traveling, I want to see and know my surroundings, to keep a minimum in the unknown.  I want to see with my eyes the mountains rolling gently in front of me or the shear cliffs of monsters that I'm passing on above.  I don't want to only know the specks of light dotting the distances and the smoke rising from those specks shading the moon.  I want to see the blockization of the land into farms and I want to see and if possible know the people living there.  I like a minimum of planning, but yet always manage to plan for traveling only in the day.  To only know the terrain that I'm in from prior knowledge and photos is not enough, I want to see on my own and become familiar with the bountiful forests spreading out on the wet side of a mountain range or the nothingness of a desert, only sand and rock to the horizon. (The two "knows" of Portuguese, saber and conhecer, would be nice to have in English.)

However, there will always be times in which you must move at night: you must meet an old friend on a deadline; you're hungry; or rain's falling like a sonofabitch.  Or sometimes, you just need a change, the current place doesn't feel good, the people aren't right, or the scenery's ugly. You have to go, into the unseeable.  You may even find yourself changing a flat tire along the Rio Tacuya at night one day.

Setting up Blogger to Show on your own Subdomain

I've had some trouble and ran a few different combinations in order to get blogger to post my blog at my own domain, namely blog.basob.com, instead of my blogger address.  I also had some trouble getting the blog to work both with and without a "www" being typed first.  After trying a few combinations and waiting, I think that I've finally got everything working correctly and here are my settings.  For this example, we'll try to redirect the Blogger blog to "blog.yourdomain.com"

1.  Go into your blog's Blogger setting and under Blog address, click advanced settings.  There will be an instructions link afterward and click that.  (Alternatively, you can also type in your domain, press OK, and wait for the error message; it will have the same information.)  The information provided in the instructions will be new CNAME settings for your hosting service.  Log into to you hosting service and enter three new CNAME records: "blog" as the name and "ghs.google.com" as the data, "www.blog" as the name and "ghs.google.com" as the data, and a third which google will provide in the instructions but is unique for every blog.

You do not need to create the new subdomain within your hosting control panel.

2.  Within your Blogger settings, enter the address that you want with www.  In our example, enter "www.blog.yourdomain.com".  Press save.  The check mark below your entered address which offers to do a redirect will likely be automatically offering a redirect that you do not want at this time, such as redirect "blog.yourdomain.com" to "www.yourdomains.com".  Do not check it at this time.

3.  After a few hours, or maybe as much as a day, log into your Blogger settings again and the redirect option probably will be more appealing, such as redirect blog.yourdomain.com to www.blog.yourdomain.com.

After this, your Blogger blog should appear at the subdomain specified, either with or without "www."